The proposition that limited natural resources provide a limit to growth and to the sustainable size of population is an old one. The natural resource that was the centre of the discussion in Malthus' day was land; more recently, some concern has been expressed over the limitations imposed by the supplies of oil, or more generally, energy sources, of phosphorus, and of other materials required for production. Those who predicted imminent doom in the nineteenth century were obviously wrong. Were they simply wrong about the immediacy of catastrophe, or did they leave out something fundamental from their calculations? There are at least three economic forces offsetting the limitations imposed by natural resources: technical change, the substitution of man-made factors of production (capital) for natural resources, and returns to scale. This study is an attempt to determine more precisely under what conditions a sustainable level of per capita consumption is feasible, to characterize steady state paths in economies with natural resources, and to describe the optimal growth path of the economy, in particular to derive the optimal rate of extraction and the optimal savings rate in the presence of exhaustible natural resources.

This paper establishes that when there is not a complete set of markets but more than one commodity the stock market equilibrium will not in general be a constrained Pareto optimum. The economy will lack both the property of exchange and production efficiency. Necessary conditions which must be satisfied if the economy is to be a constrained Pareto optimum for all technologies are derived; if all individuals have identical, homothetic indifference maps, then either there must be unitary price elasticities (so there is no effective risk) or all individuals must have the same degree of risk aversion (so there is no trade on the stock market).

Stiglitz establishes the relationship between monopoly, non-linear pricing, and imperfect information in the insurance market.

Symposium on Economics of Information: Introduction Joseph E. Stiglitz Joseph E. Stiglitz Stanford University and Oxford University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 44, Issue 3, October 1977, Pages 389–391, https://doi.org/10.2307/2296897 Published: 01 October 1977

Journal Article Growth with Exhaustible Natural Resources: The Competitive Economy Get access Joseph E. Stiglitz Joseph E. Stiglitz St Catherine's College, Oxford and Stanford University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 41, Issue 5, December 1974, Pages 139–152, https://doi.org/10.2307/2296378 Published: 01 December 1974

Journal Article Incentives and Risk Sharing in Sharecropping Get access Joseph E. Stiglitz Joseph E. Stiglitz Yale University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 41, Issue 2, April 1974, Pages 219–255, https://doi.org/10.2307/2296714 Published: 01 April 1974

Steven Salop, Joseph Stiglitz; Bargains and Ripoffs: A Model of Monopolistically Competitive Price Dispersion, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 44, Issue

Partha Dasgupta, Joseph Stiglitz; On Optimal Taxation and Public Production12, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 39, Issue 1, 1 January 1972, Pages 87

The paper shows that between two competitive but risky economies with no insurance markets, free trade may be Pareto inferior to no trade. The model is simple enough to show clearly the role prices play in transferring and sharing risk when there is an incomplete set of markets, but rich enough to exhibit the resulting inefficiencies dramatically.

This paper examines the interactions between market structure and resource allocation over time when there is endogenous technical progress. The structures considered are a planned economy, pure monopoly, and competition with patent rights. In an efficient allocation the date of invention coincides with the date of innovation (the date at which technology is used). This is also true with a pure monopoly, but monopoly retards technical progress relative to the efficient level. Competition for patents rights to a new technology results in excessively rapid technical progress if the resource endowment of the economy is sufficiently large. Also, competition may lead to “sleeping patents” where invention strictly precedes the date of innovation.